Monthly Archives: March 2016

Last summer I volunteered as a sailing assistant at a facility known as Sail Newport. This amazing place, founded in 1983, is located in Newport, RI. It is a unique place. It has the unique goal of teaching children how to sail. Sailing is typically an elitist sport. There are two traditional methods of learning how to sail. The first; to learn from parents who know how to sail already. The second; to be members of a yacht club, which ate typically the only places who offer sailing lessons. If a particular child’s family is not fortunate enough to own their own boat, finding a place to learn how to sail is very difficult. Sail Newport aims to break down these barriers and enable children to learn how to sail who might not otherwise get the opportunity to do so.

Learning to navigate your own boat teaches confidence, resiliency, and independence. In order to skipper your own boat, you need to learn how to be independent, to make split second decisions of vast importance. It imparts a valuable lesson; when your boat capsizes, it is always possible to flip it upright and keep going. Managing difficult situations teaches confidence and the ability to trust one’s own decisions. When something (inevitably) goes wrong, it demonstrates the importance of remaining calm. When I was younger, I learned how to sail and later raced at SN. Sail Newport taught me so much. My amazing experience kickstarted my love of the ocean and imparted upon me life lessons I still call on almost every day. As such, I felt that I needed to give back, to help other children to have the same amazing experiences that I myself had had.

During the summer, I volunteered as an assistant coach. I helped explain concepts, such as sailing upwind, and then demonstrated them, as of all the other instructors I was the only one who could fit in the tiny, student-sized boats. I have volunteered with them in previous years, but this year I preformed a greater role than in previous years. As they had had experience with me before, they trusted me to play a greater role. I was allowed to ride with the instructors on the motorboats, calling out instructions to the group of children sailing alongside, and on the dock, I helped show them how to correctly set up and disassemble the boats. It was a very rewarding experience for me. It helped me to develop my leadership skills, and I hope that I had a positive impact on the lives of the children that I worked with.

This summer I was a counselor in training at a camp called Camp Dark Waters in Medford, New Jersey. Camp Dark Waters is a quaker summer camp for less privileged kids on a creak with dark waters, hence the name. One of my most fond memories from this summer was helping a seven year old boy named AJ get his Bowman. Bowmen are campers who pass a series of canoeing challenges. AJ was shy and homesick almost all of the time, so I was surprised when he approached me and asked for my help on getting his Bowman. I agreed and in less than a week there was only one out of twenty challenges left. The last challenge was called unswamping, it requires two campers to lift a fifty pound canoe filled with water above their heads and flip it to drain it. AJ failed the first three times, unable to pick the canoe up over his head. On the fourth time he mustered all of his strength and was able to pick the canoe up. It took the rest of his strength to hold it above his head for the thirty seconds needed to empty the canoe of all of its water. After thirty seconds we put the canoe down and he started crying. For the rest of camp he was more social and wasn’t at all homesick. On the last day when he was being pick up before he introduced me to his parents saying that I changed his whole camp experience. Those words made me reflect on the maybe twenty minutes I had spent with him canoeing over the summer. The little work I had put in made the difference for his whole summer, and that amazed and motivated me to keep working on the little things that really counted.